ALP 7.4%
Incumbent MP
Anna Burke, since 1998.
Geography
Eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Chisholm covers most of the western half of Monash council area and the western third of Whitehorse council area, along with a small part of Kingston council area. Suburbs include Oakleigh, Chadstone, Mount Waverley, Glen Waverley, Box Hill and Mont Albert.
History
Chisholm was created for the expansion of the House of Representatives at the 1949 election. For the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the seat was relatively safe for the Liberal Party. Boundary changes saw the seat become a marginal seat in the early 1980s, and in the last decade it has firmed up as a relatively safe seat for the ALP.
The seat was first won in Kent Hughes for the Liberal Party. Hughes was a former Deputy Premier of Victoria who had enlisted in the military at the outbreak of the Second World War, and ended up captured as part of the fall of Singapore and spent four years as a prisoner of war before returning to state politics, and moving to Canberra in 1949.
Hughes was chairman of the organising committee for the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, but after the Olympics was dropped from the ministry, and sat on the backbenches until his death in 1970.
Tony Staley won the 1970 by-election for the Liberal Party. He served as a junior minister in the Fraser government from 1976 until his retirement from politics in 1980. He went on to serve as Federal President of the Liberal Party.
The Liberal Party’s Graham Harris held on to Chisholm in 1980, but with a much smaller margin then those won by Hughes or Staley. He was defeated in 1983 by the ALP’s Helen Mayer.
Mayer was re-elected in 1984, but lost the seat in 1987 to the Liberal Party’s Michael Wooldridge. Wooldridge quickly became a senior Liberal frontbencher, and served as Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party from 1993 to 1994. Wooldridge was appointed Minister for Health upon the election of the Howard government in 1996. Wooldridge moved to the safer seat of Casey in 1998, and retired in 2001.
Chisholm was won in 1998 by the ALP’s Anna Burke, who has held the seat ever since, and was elected Deputy Speaker after the 2007 election.
Candidates
- Phil Goodman (Family First)
- Anna Burke (Labor)
- Nimrod Evans (Secular Party)
- Josh Fergeus (Greens)
- John Nguyen (Liberal)
Political situation
This seat has become relatively safe for the ALP. Burke should be able to hold on to it as long as she runs.
2007 result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| Anna Burke | ALP | 38,439 | 48.12 | +4.13 |
| Myles King | LIB | 31,514 | 39.45 | -4.16 |
| Alistair McCaskill | GRN | 6,765 | 8.47 | +1.13 |
| Gary Ong | FF | 1,953 | 2.45 | +0.56 |
| Daniel Berk | DEM | 1,053 | 1.32 | -0.69 |
| Lars Thystrup | CEC | 150 | 0.19 | +0.01 |
2007 two-candidate-preferred result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| Anna Burke | ALP | 45,833 | 57.38 | +4.73 |
| Myles King | LIB | 34,041 | 42.62 | -4.73 |
Booth breakdown
Booths in Chisholm have been divided into two areas: two of those in Whitehorse council area and the other two in Monash council area. The ALP won a majority in all areas, winning two-thirds of the vote in Oakleigh-Clayton and smaller majorities in the other areas. About 40% of the population lives in the Mount Waverley area in the centre of the seat.
Polling booths in Chisholm. Oakleigh-Clayton in red, Mt Waverley in blue, Burwood-Box Hill South in green, Box Hill in yellow.
| Voter group | GRN % | ALP 2CP % | Total votes | % of votes |
| Mt Waverley | 7.19 | 55.35 | 26,067 | 32.64 |
| Box Hill | 10.10 | 58.31 | 12,203 | 15.28 |
| Burwood-Box Hill South | 9.56 | 54.27 | 12,098 | 15.15 |
| Oakleigh-Clayton | 7.52 | 66.86 | 11,273 | 14.11 |
| Other votes | 9.08 | 55.87 | 18,233 | 22.83 |
Results of the 2007 federal election in Chisholm.
This and Bruce are examples of former eastern suburbs seats pushed into the ethnic south-east by the 1996 redistribution. Labor’s worry in both would be that the boundaries might be redrawn to make them eastern suburban again. is Chisholm the only seat with 2 universities?
@Geoff – even if it does move back north after the current redistribution is completed, I reckon the ALP would still hang on to Chisholm (unless they had an exceptionally bad campaign). Anna Burke has a strong local profile and has built up the ALP’s vote over the years (e.g. this was one of the few seats that didn’t swing against the ALP in 2004). The ALP also managed to win the state seat of Mt Waverley in 2002 and the managed to hold on to it in 2006 – which is a surprising result, as it’s the sort of area that, traditionally, the Liberals ought to hold strongly. Maybe this is an indication of long-term demographic changes in the area. It has certainly become more ethnically diverse.
This post highlights the value in the approach of breaking booths within a seat into regions – I’m surprised at how well the Greens polled in Oakleigh-Clayton, and how relatively poorly they polled in Mt Waverley. I would have thought the Mt Waverley booths would be closer to what they polled in Box Hill and Burwood-Box Hill South. If there wasn’t this regional breakdown, it would be easy to interpret the Greens strong overall result as being a reasonable ceiling – whereas looking at this booth breakdown, it looks like they haven’t harvested all of their potential vote and they ought to be able to increase their vote by another 1-2% if they can push that Mt Waverley booths up to where the Box Hill booths are.
“is Chisholm the only seat with 2 universities?”
A few seats do.
Sydney has UTS and Uni of Sydney (and a dozen outposts of other uni’s). The Uni of Adelaide and Uni of SA are right next to each other, so Adelaide has two. Fraser has ANU and UC. Melbourne, I believe, has three – Uni of Melbourne, RMIT and Victoria Uni, along with lots of outpost stations for other uni’s. I’m not familiar with Perth.
All the Perth unis are in different seats.
Polly:
“I’m surprised at how well the Greens polled in Oakleigh-Clayton”
I’m not sure 7.5% is that grand, but suit yourself – maybe it’s good by the standards of federal seats (it’s certainly better than the bordering bits of Bruce and Issacs), or Melbourne seats. It’d certainly be affected by the number of students living around Monash uni, which from memory has a very activist-heavy guild. I’m guessing the 10% result around Box Hill is similarly affected by Deakin uni.
@Bird of Paradox – I’m clearly talking relative to that area
(especially since I bag the Greens for only polling 7.19% in Mt Waverley). I think it’s to the Greens credit that they can poll so well in Clayton, which is a traditional ALP-voting industrial area with extremely high migration (with only 48% of residents born in Australia). It is far more like Springvale and Noble Park than it is like the suburbs around Melbourne Uni.
Also, I wonder how much impact Monash Uni has on Oakleigh compared to Mt Waverley? They’re both neighbouring suburbs to the uni and plenty of students live in both.
Anyway, it’s not a major point, it’s just that the Greens overall vote in Chisholm in 2007 looks really good, but when looking at these booth groupings, it becomes obvious that they should be polling even higher.
I will be running as the Greens candidate for Chisholm in the 2010 Federal election.
My prediction: Labor retain, with a 1-2% swing to them.